AES Brasil – City

Introduction

This project was awesome! Imagine, a social game, where you should ride a real bike, your login is made with facial recognition, you have achievements and a internal rank among all users that is showed at the company’s reception.

That is the game! The game itself was made by Ideas.Farm, the company that i am employee, to AES Brasil and is present at the rooftop at the Cubo building. So, the programming, animations, hud, logic, collisions, detections, sensors, traffic was made by me, everything about the game that was not related to 3D models, and UI design.

About the game

At first you go to the rooftop of the building where you can find a bike and a computer with the game. The PC is a All-in-One, so you can touch the screen, it has a integrated webcam. The screen is idle with Full Face software for facial recognition, where you may log in with the tracking of your face, the only thing is, you must have a registration with them, otherwise you cannot be recognited, else you may log in with your e-mail.

When you logs in, a tutorial is shown with the instructions about the game, and a guided is shown after, explaining the game interface.

After that you can start pedalling and your energy gauge starts growing up. Every cycle, you gain 8 in population and a new house. At the beginning you have a land that only farmers moves in, so you can have a region full of farms and things related to that. As you progress the game and reach level 3 you finally upgrades to city pattern and city type buildings starts to show up.

Game mechanics

The game as i said before, is about pedalling to generate energy for your city and growing it as you produce more and more to maintain your city.

Every time you get a new house, you have a chance to upgrade an existed one instead of gaining a level 1 type. If you are at level 1 of your city, only level 1 houses will be builded in your land, but as you progress, every level has new buildings to adds to your city. So, we may say you are at level 3, and when you reach the goal for that level gauge, you gain a new house, if an existed one building is selected it will upgrades. If it is a level 1 building, it upgrades to level 2, if it is a level 2 it upgrades to level 3, as how far you are in the game.

There are 2 types of energy bars, the lower one, that consists in the current energy you are generating from your pedalling, and the top one the is the storage. The storage is where you can keep your city energyzed when you are offline, every 10% of the storage is equivalent to 1 day that you can be offline without losing population. If you loses population, you have to fulfill your city needs and generate energy again to fills your storage and stop the city’s blackouts.

Achievements

As i may say, it is a competive game, so everyone needs achievements. That are 35 achievements the goes from how much population you have in your city, to how long you can keep pedalling continuously. To track the time based achievements, a stopwatch is at the positioned in the screens bottom left corner where you can see how insane you are. Besides the achievements badges, you have special buildings, like MASP, Cubo building, BANESPA, Stadium and so on.

The Game Process

Everything starts small, so this project was not a exception, you can see every video about the steps of the game programming and production at my Instagram account. The related ones to this projects are the following ones: